Increase Crawford Literary Fiction, 53,000 words

I will allow Niklas Rischel, an early editor of The Homer Ode, to give voice to Increase and Homer in an early broadside dated 1794. It refers to Increase and the first, 1790, census:

A young man of local origin, was appointed the first counter of the area north, northwest of Rome. Some have alleged that the letter was a forgery. Others that it was a practical joke perpetrated on the young Increase Crawford. The young man spent the best part of a year with his countings -- from the northwest farms of Rome, westward as close to Fort Ontario as he could safely traverse without actually counting the British, northward, not so far as the great river, before he eventually laid his pencil to rest, arguing that the region, indeed the world, was more expansive than its accounting. And so, our young Increase vanished without submitting his numbers to the federal government. And so, subsequently, the State has now stolen our name, our heritage, left the towns and hamlets of Homer, Hoofdorp, Irish Settlement, Harring Cross, Moselle, Kempt, Slab, and the rest, afloat and no longer tethered to the earth, overflowing the map, the terrain, the space alotted to it, and so too, with the names, language adrift.

Indeed, the State has, with its namings of the Great Lots, wrenched from Plutarch the great classical array, wrenched and tossed into the wilderness the likes of warriors, emperors, statesmen, poets, liars, and thieves.... Virgil, Lysander, Manlius, Romulus, Hector. Included in this array.... Homer ... some three days to our south, a name stolen from us, and so, with the authority of the State, made real and consequent, worthy of counting and being counted, worthy of its place in the world, and, in the end, leaving us counterfeit, immaterial, free.